Commercially-minded yet dedicated to his art, Josiah Wedgwood reflected the contradictions of his age, finds Tanya Harrod

Let’s start with what has been considered negative about Josiah Wedgwood’s impact on the history of ceramics. The 20th-century studio potter Michael Cardew admitted that Wedgwood was an “industrialising genius,” who married science, technology and entrepreneurship. But Cardew made an important technical criticism of the 18th-century potter. Wedgwood initially fired his wares at a high temperature. Once glazed and decorated they were re-fired in the lower temperature “glost” kiln. Although this system avoided breakages, for Cardew this meant “killing the body before you glazed it” and “gave the ware that cold appearance under its make-up of lavish ornamentation.” Cardew, more artist than industrialist, contrasted Wedgwood’s technique with that used to make Chinese stoneware in the 12th century, which he valued for its complete unity of glaze and clay body.

The art critic Roger Fry agreed. Though Wedgwood was a great technician, argued Fry, his approach to ceramics “probably contributed to the final destruction of the art, as an art, in England.” In contrast to the rugged beauty of medieval English pottery, in Wedgwood’s hands the qualities of the potter’s raw materials were “carefully obliterated by mechanical means.” Herbert Read took a somewhat more nuanced view in his 1934 Art and Industry, praising the good design of Wedgwood’s “useful” tableware for being presciently modern. But he dismissed Wedgwood’s neoclassical pots and plaques—the “ornamental” wares—as mere borrowing. The Greek vases that Wedgwood sought to emulate were, in Read’s view, “not good pottery.”

Today few would focus solely on Wedgwood’s aesthetics. Apart from a dwindling band of studio potters, not many feel passionately about kindly clay bodies, ceramic “warmth” and the unity of the clay body and glaze. In our anxiously picked-over national history, Wedgwood is now regarded as one of those pioneering industrialists Britain used to be known for and whose demise we lament. As long ago as the 1960s, historian Neil McKendrick had identified Wedgwood as an inventor-entrepreneur who pioneered innovative sales techniques and instituted time-and-motion discipline among his workforce through a careful system of labour division. From the 1980s, as academics sought to identify the origins of our consumer society, Wedgwood became a magus figure—the harbinger of a world of luxury goods to come. More recently again, he has been identified as the forerunner of such contemporary entrepreneurial titans as Steve Jobs of Apple and Bill Bowerman of Nike.